Emerging Technologies for Healthcare

There is an increase in the number of heart patients throughout the world due to the unhealthy lifestyle. Most of the time delay in getting medical attention results in the loss of life of the patients.

With the advancement in technology, regular monitoring of the heartbeat and pulse rate is possible by means of sensor-enabled IoT devices. Since it is a real-time monitoring, any variations in the heart rate or pulse rate will be alerted to the patients as well as doctors through connected devices. Immediate medical attention is possible which can save many lives.

Workload of the nurses in hospitals are more which makes them exhausted and less efficient. Artificial Intelligence–enabled robots can assist the nurses in their day-to-day activities. The robots may be connected to IoT devices so that the activity of the robots can be scheduled and monitored by the nurses.

Robots can assist the nurses in picking and placing the medicines and alerting the patients to take medicines on time. They can give personal care for the patients and also can clean the rooms and beds. Nurses can assign the tasks to robots and monitor it. These robots may be controlled by the patients and nurses by means of mobile devices.

With these assistant robots, nurses can manage their workload in an efficient manner and provide better service to the patients.

These are some of the IoT applications in healthcare system which can give a new dimension to the patient treatment and healthcare services.

It has been found that the four factors which demand the growth of smart healthcare operations are the following:

Remote health monitoring for aged people

Awareness about the importance of health and staying fit

Increased use of wearable smart gadgets for monitoring health

New business models based on smart healthcare systems

The global market growth is as shown in Figure 1.2. It has been estimated that the remote health monitoring will increase the global healthcare market by 24.55% by 2020. Increase in the use of ingestible smart pills will drive the market to 6.93 billion dollars by 2020 with a market growth of 23.62%. It has been estimated that the total market value of smart healthcare will be169.32 billion dollars by 2020.

Figure 1.2 Global market growth.

It has also been estimated that the use of robots along with IoTs will increase by 50% in the near future to assist in the healthcare daily activities. Globally, about 60% of the healthcare organizations have implemented IoT devices for their services and facility. This is a digital transformation era for the healthcare services.

We have discussed about the various applications, advantages, and challenges of IoT in health sectors in the previous sections. The combination of AI and ML along with IoT devices can open up new opportunities in the field of health sectors especially in prediction, detection, risk assessment, treatments, etc. Cloud services can easily be utilized to overcome the limited resources and computational capacity required for the implementation of AI and ML.

The quality of the internet connectivity also needs to be improved, owing to the huge amount of data generated as for real-time data generation, response time, and performance plays a major role. Healthcare professionals should be able to take proactive decisions based on the real-time data to prevent the degradation of health conditions.

Remote diagnostics can be made possible by means of combining big data analytics along with ML techniques and AI by analyzing the vast number of images stored in the database.

Human errors can be reduced due to the advancements in telerobotic surgeries, and hence, the Internet of Robotics will play a major role in future healthcare sectors.

Due to the evolutions of these technologies, more research will happen in biomedical sector and modern healthcare systems which may provide personalized drugs and targeted drug delivery systems.

With the promising research going on in the healthcare sectors, more innovative smart wearables and gadgets can be expected in future. Also, due to the increased use of IoT in healthcare sectors, countries around the globe are formulating new policies and rules for the usage of IoT in medical practices.

More research is happening to overcome the security challenges faced by the usage of IoT devices in healthcare sectors, the future of applications of IoT in healthcare services is very bright, and it will give an unprecedented transformation to the healthcare industry services.

In the coming decade, Internet of Healthcare things (IoHT) will lead to improved efficiency and effectiveness in terms of systems, process and service delivery in treatment, diagnosis and patient care standards.

IoT in health sectors is a major revolution that has happened in the recent past. With the advancement in technology, the awareness of the smart gadgets is also increasing among individuals. The increase in awareness of leading a healthy life style made the common people to depend on smart wearables to monitor their health and daily activities.

The ease at which the connected devices reduces the workload of healthcare facilities motivated majority of the healthcare services to implement IoT devices for healthcare system. With the increase in use of IoT devices, the security and privacy concerns of the patient private data also increased. Continuous research is happening in this field to protect the privacy data from security threats. With the proper care in implementation, securing the privacy data, and maintaining the IoT devices by timely updating it, these devices can bring a new dimension to the healthcare field.

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